East End My Cradle

William Goldman

1940

Sensitive Content

This text recounts acts of violence. The text provides insight into Jewish history; however, The Posen Library does not condone or promote violence or oppression of any kind.

Part One

Chapter 1. Yids Versus Goys

Anti-Semitism in my infancy, had its compensations, for being confined practically to children (I speak of anti-Semitism not as a subjective attitude but in its positive sense, as demonstrated in Germany), it never amounted to anything more serious than a kind of game. It was largely a pretext for staging…
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Creator Bio

William Goldman

1910–2009

Anglo-Jewish writer William (Willy) Goldman was born into a working-class Orthodox family in London, the child of Russian and Romanian immigrants. Goldman left school at age fourteen to work at a sweatshop, and abandoned traditional Judaism. Partly to escape poverty, he took up boxing as a sport; as a team captain he felt that he could “stand up straight and not be frightened.” In the 1930s, he met John Lehmann, founder of the magazine New Writing, who employed him and published his stories. Goldman’s works, often satiric, portrayed the lives of hard-working Jewish immigrants in London’s East End. The British novelist C. P. Snow once described him as “our best reporter of the East End.” Goldman was also compared to Dickens by more than one reviewer.

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